Adam Meyer

Adam Meyer is Chief Security Strategist at SurfWatch Labs. He has served in leadership positions in the defense, technology, and critical infrastructure sectors for more than 15 years. Prior to joining SurfWatch Labs, he was CISO for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. He formerly served as the Director of Information Assurance and Command IA Program Manager for the Naval Air Warfare Center, Naval Air Systems Command one of the Navy's premier engineering and acquisition commands. Mr. Meyer holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from American Military University and Capitol College.

Threat intelligence playbooks that support strategic and operational levels help teams be more effective, more certain in their actions and allow security programs to be agile/maintained as situations change.

With sound and timely operational threat intelligence, you can make life a lot harder for adversaries and have a much better understanding of how your organization is positioned against today's cyber threats.

While malicious actors demanding ransoms is not new, the surge of organizations being targeted with fake extortion demands and empty threats is. Let’s look at how extortion campaigns are carried out through the “avenue of approach” lens.

Cyber threat intelligence needs to be tailored to its audience as it means different things to different people, whether it’s on-the-network defenders, Red Teams, threat analysts, risk officers, business executives and Board of Directors, legal, application owners, and so on.

Cyber threat intelligence is showing us is that most threats simply exploit a series of well-documented vulnerabilities and other weak points to move along the path of least resistance – and the most profit.

While organizations can’t really impact cybercriminals’ intent or capability, placing greater focus on reducing the bad guys’ opportunity - especially as the level of presence is growing - should be at the top of your security to-do list in 2017.

Cyber threat intelligence can help further optimize your incident response processes so that you can not only respond faster and better, but also reduce adversary opportunity and in turn go through fewer incident response fire drills.